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WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! JOHN STRACHEY WHY YOU SHOULD BE A SOCIALIST What causes unemployment? What causes war? What makes booms and slumps? What is socialism? What is capitalism? ISBN: 978-1-387-92715-9 VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD LONDON 1938 THE NOVEMBER 8TH PUBLISHING HOUSE TORONTO 2022 CONTENTS I. The Secret in the Pay Envelope ..................... 1 II. How the System Works ............................. 21 III. What They Get Out of It ......................... 34 IV. What It Has Done to Us .......................... 44 V. Why It Stops Working .............................. 61 VI. Must We Die For It? ................................ 77 VII. What Can We Put In Its Place? .............. 91 VIII. “I Have Seen the Future, and It Works” .................................................. 115 IX. What Would Socialism Be like Here? ..... 124 X. How to Get There ................................... 137 I. THE SECRET IN THE PAY ENVELOPE What are wages? In Britain today nine out of ten of us live on wages, or are dependent upon someone who is living on wages. For out of a working population of 211/ million, 19 million of us are 2 wage-earners.1 Wages support nine out of ten of us. But what are wages? What is this sum of money which we find when we look into the pay envelope at the end of the week? This, to be sure, is the money we use to buy food and clothes and fuel and to pay the rent — to live on. But where does it come from? What makes it sometimes get bigger and sometimes smaller? And what sometimes makes it stop coming altogether? When we have found the answers to these questions, we shall be in a position to understand the puzzles of our times. That pay envelope con- tains, not only our livelihoods, but the secret of 1 Census of 1931. Figures to the nearest half million. To be more exact, 88.5 per cent of the working population live on wages and salaries (a salary may be defined as a wage paid monthly or quarterly), 11.5 per cent are in the remain- ing two census categories (see below). 1 the whole economic system. Why live on wages? Nine-tenths of us live on wages. But that wasn’t always so; nor is it so in many parts of the world today. In fact, never be- fore in the history of Britain has such a high proportion of the population lived on wages. And nowhere else in the world (except Belgium) does such a high proportion do so today. How did we get this way? Why have wages become the essen- tial means of life for nine-tenths of us? How did many of our great-grandparents, and how do a few of our friends today, live, if not by earning wages? They lived (and live) by working for themselves. They had a few acres of ground and culti- vated it. Or they had a handloom and wove cloth on it. Or they had a forge and shod horses in it. A few people (1,273,000 to be exact, or 6 per cent of the working population of Britain) still live like that. They have a one-man shop, or a little garage or a small holding of land. But there are not many of them left. So the rest of us work for wages. (Ex- cept those 1,180,000 people (census of 1931 again) who do not necessarily work for themselves, nor for wages, but for whom we work; more 2 about them below, however.) Why can’t we set up for ourselves? Nowadays most people take it for granted that the only way to get a job is to get someone to employ them. And so it is. But why? Why can’t everyone who is out of a job just “set up for themselves” in business of some sort? Why can’t they start weaving cloth or shoeing horses, or farming land for themselves, as their ancestors did? Well, you know the answer. They can’t get any land to farm; they can’t get a forge (and there are precious few horses left to shoe!). They might find an old handloom in some attic, but, if they did, they could only weave cloth at about ten times the cost that the great power-looms of the Lancashire mills can produce it. Every now and then some worker can somehow get hold of a little shop and set up for himself that way.1 But that isn’t easy, and it is getting more and more diffi- cult. Woolworths and Marks and Spencer, and the International, and the other chain stores, are just round the comer. 1 Over a quarter (27 per cent to be exact) of these 1,200,000 odd “workers on their own account” are one- man shopkeepers. (Census figures.) 3 No capital? And so it’s work for wages for nine out of ten of us. It is work for wages because the means of work; the tools of the trade; the raw ma- terials; the land, are out of our reach. We haven’t the capital to buy these things, without which we cannot set up in business for ourselves. If these things, the land, mines and factories — the capital of the country — have got out of our reach, where have they got to? They have got into the hands of a smallish class of people, com- monly called capitalists. These include the 1,180,000 people of whom I spoke just now as being recorded in the census of 1931 as neither working on their own account nor working for wages. Naturally there are more of them than that, because this is the number of people who do work themselves, by way of management and su- pervision, even though they employ wage-labour. And many of the people who own capital do not work at all.1 So the people of this country can be divided up into the above three groups, or classes, accord- 1 On the other hand this group includes salaried man- agers, some of whom may have no ownership of capital. 4 ing to their way of life. There are the 19 million, and their dependants (88.5 per cent), who work for wages. By and large they have no appreciable capital. Then there are the 1,273,000 and their dependants (6.0 per cent), who work for themselves. They have just enough capital to make them independent and able to work for themselves; but they do not have enough capital to be able to live on other people’s work. Then there are the 1,180,000 and their dependants (5.5 per cent); and they have enough capital to make other people work for them. What each lot gets. Another way of dividing up the population is by the size of the incomes which they get. If we do that we shall find that there are three groups in this case also, though they do not exactly correspond to the above three occupa- tional, or class, groups. A careful recent survey was undertaken by Mr. Douglas Jay for his book, The Socialist Case. His conclusion is “...In Great Britain, 17,600,000 out of 20,000,000 persons, or about nine in every ten, are working-class, though not necessarily of course all manual workers; and 12,000,000 of these receive an income scarcely above the subsistence level. Another 5 small but substantial group, of somewhere about 2,000,000, receive a middle-class or professional-class income ranging from £250 to £1,000. And finally there is a tiny group of 300,000 very rich persons, whose aggregate income makes up a very considerable proportion of the total national income.”1 By “working-class” Mr. Jay means anyone with an income of less than £250 a year. His middle group of 2 million does not correspond to those who “work on their own account”. But still the same broad conclusion emerges. The nine- tenths of us who have little or no capital get low incomes (all under £5 a week, and about two- thirds near the subsistence level). A middle group, with some capital, but not much, gets a middling income. And a very tiny group at the top gets the really big incomes, and owns the really big blocs of capital. Who has the capital? Now we shall be told that all this must be very distorted; that everybody 1 Mr. Jay is reckoning by the number of people with incomes, which was in 1929 about 20 million. As the population was then about 46 million, each income drawer had just over one dependant. The proportions come out the same, of course, whether you put the dependants in or not. 6